About Gordon

Living alone on a reporter's salary meant Gordon Dritschilo had to learn how to cook, which he threw himself into with a geekish passion. In the process, went from the sort of person who orders a cheeseburger at a fancy restaurant to having a reputation as the guy who will eat anything.

September 2012

09/27/2012

I'll level with you folks -- this is the kind of thing I only make when I want to show off. Still, isn't it fun to show off every once in a while?

This is the type of dish best made in phases. The turkey can be cut up and the skin rendered well in advance of the rest of the cooking. With that done, making the batter and coating and cooking the turkey just before serving should go smoothly.

When I originally made this, I used the cracklings to garnish a salad. They would have been better off sprinkled over the turkey.

Pumpkin-Battered Turkey

2 turkey thighs

4 ounces pumpkin ale

1 egg

4 ounces flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 tablespoon salt

salt and pepper to taste

butter for cooking

water

Skin and bone the turkey thighs. Cut out individual muscles without too much fat, where possible, and pound flat. Reserve excess meat for tacos and the bones for making stock.

Chop up the skin put it in a shallow pan with a little water. Cook over a medium heat to render fat and then strain out the resulting cracklings. Season those and put them aside for later.

Whisk together the pumpkin ale and the egg. Combine the flour, salt and baking powder and whisk into the beer-egg mixture to form a batter.

Pat the turkey dry, season it with salt and pepper and coat the pieces with the batter.

Melt a pat of butter into half the turkey fat and cook the battered turkey over medium-high heat until well browned on both sides. Add the remainder of the turkey fat and more butter to the pan as needed.

09/26/2012

This bread has a muffiny consistency, largely because it's based on a muffin batter. It will be crumbly and therefore will need to be thickly sliced. This is a good thing to add to a Thanksgiving spread and makes a decent breakfast as well.

Leek and Pumpkin Beer Bread

3 large leeks, trimmed and roughly chopped

8 ounces pumpkin ale

2 eggs

1 stick melted butter

8 ounces flour

4 ounces sugar

2 tablespoons baking powder

1 tablespoon salt

Salt and pepper to taste

Additional butter for cooking and pan-greasing

Preheat the oven to 350.

Soften the leeks in some butter, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste, and let them cool.

Beat the eggs into the beer until combined and then whisk in the melted butter. Stir in the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, mixing until a batter is formed. Stir in the leeks.

Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes. To test for doneness, stick a toothpick or skewer into the center -- if it comes out clean, it's done.

09/25/2012

"Cassoulet" is the fancy French version of baked beans. The cassoulets I have eaten typically use white beans, andouille sausage and whatever throwaway bits of meat the cook has on hand. They are fabulous.

Here we continue with the theme for the week -- introduced on today's food page -- of cooking with pumpkin ale. Turkey seems like the most obvious protien when cooking with pumpkin ale, so I felt like I had to get fancy when I was using it.

Now, my policy on this blog is to post recipes as I actually made them, not as I wish I had in retrospect, so I offer this with two caveats.

Caveat the first is that I forgot just how much bigger a turkey thigh is than a chicken thigh. Unless you have a really wide pot of some sort, you're going to have a hard time getting six turkey thighs to fit neatly in a single layer.

This is an issue because you want as much of the skin exposed as possible so it gets nice and crispy. My solution,as you'll see below, was to finish the thighs in the oven, outside of the pot. Your solution could simply be to use fewer thighs. With the beans as a side dish, one thigh might well be enough for two relatively light eaters.

The second caveat stems from the same memory failure as the first. The temperature and cooking time are both calibrated to dishes I've made either with chicken thighs or with duck leg-thigh combos. The turkey came out cooked through and edible, but fell short of the falling-off-the-bone tender mark. Next time, I'll probably try two hours at 325.

Pat the turkey necks dry with paper towels and season them liberally with salt and pepper. Brown them in the butter over medium-high heat and remove from the pot.

Add the onions, carrots, celery, thyme and bay leaves and cook until the onions soften, deglazing with some of the pumpkin ale. Add the garlic and andouille, cook for another minute, stir in the beans and return the turkey necks to the pot with just enough beer to cover.

Bring to a boil, cover, place in the oven and cook for at least four hours. The longer you let this cook, the better it will be.

About two hours before you are ready to serve, remove the pot from the oven, uncover and place on the stove over a medium heat. Raise the heat in the oven to 375.

Pat the turkey thighs dry with paper towels, season with salt and pepper and brown them in butter in a separate pan. Don't worry about getting them super dark because they will continue to brown in the oven.

While the thighs are browning (unless you've got the biggest frying pan I've ever seen, you'll have to do them in batches) fish out the necks and strip as much meat as you can from them. Be careful, as the necks will be hot and the bones have some sharp little points on them. Return the meat to the pot and stir in.

When the thighs are browned, place them skin-side up in the pot in as close to a single layer as you can get them. Deglaze the pan with a little of the pumpkin ale and pour it into the pot. Top off the pot with a little more beer if necessary -- you want liquid half to two-thirds of the way up the sides of the meat.

Bring the pot back up to a boil and return it to the oven, uncovered, for 90 minutes. At the end of that time, move the thighs to a broiler plate or roasting pan and give them another 10 minutes in the oven while cooking the beans down a little more on the stove.

09/12/2012

Going right to the top of my Christmas list is "The Hemingway Cookbook," which, according to the publishing blurb, assembles recipes from his favorite places to eat and "other sources." Truth be told, I will probably never have occasion to make "Fillet of Lion washed down with Campari and Gordon’s Gin or a cool Cuba Libre," but if the opportunity ever does present itself, I intend to be prepared!

For the ambitious among you, Michael Ruhlman has posted instructions on making your own salt. We're a little too far from the ocean for me to try this regularly, but I may give this a whirl the next time I'm vacationing near a beach.

I'm linking to The Guardian not once, but twice today. First, they have this selection of recipes for 1920s cocktails -- there's a bit of irony here in that the fruity cocktail was essentially invented in the 1920s in order to disguise the godawful taste of the bathtub liquor Americans were drinking during Prohibition. Then, they have this collection of cooking advice for the student who just returned to college.

09/11/2012

Back when I was childless, I would have dinner-and-a-movie parties where I tried to match up the meal to the movie. While my menus for "Doctor Zhivago" and "The Lover" were perhaps more accessable (yes, I'll get around to posting them at some point) this was by far the most interesting.

Right after the death of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, I felt the need to honor the life of the man whose writings were such an influence on my own. So, there were two movies -- "Where the Buffalo Roam" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vega" -- paired with the most out-there dish I could come up with: ostrich chili.

And, don't think that I just picked up some ostrich meat (they had it at Price Chopper back then) and called it a day. Oh, no -- I wanted this dish to be a case study in pushing the envelope through questionable choices. I browned the meat in lamb fat and deglazed the pot with one of Dr. Thompson's preferred tipples, Wild Turkey.

(Where did the lamb fat come from? I'd braised some lamb shanks in the days prior and saved the liquid, prying off the cap of fat that formed as it cooled.)

The rest of the liquid was beer, and otherwise the chili roughly followed my standard approach (which, if you haven't already, you can read more about on today's Rutland Herald food page).

My guests that night appeared to like it, but they may have just been afraid of how I'd react if they didn't.

I don't know where you can get ostrich nowadays, but emu, which Roots still has on the menu and thus must be available somewhere around here, is similar. "Emu chili" has a nice ring to it.

09/10/2012

Apples and cheddar are a frequent combination in the U.S. In England, you'll see apples matched up with Stilton, and they go equally well with either of the other canonical blue cheeses. So, if you ever have some apples and Gorgonzola kicking around and want to make some kick-ass munchies, slice up the apples, spread some of the Gorgonzola on the slices and pop them in the toaster oven until the cheese gets melty.

I have spoken before about how well apples work with chorizo, and someday I intend to gat around to hollowing out some apples, stuffing them with Mexican chorizo and baking the whole thing, similar to squash stuffed with sausage.

Apples also work well with all the various paprika-spiced Portuguese sausages. I've cooked apples with morcela, and it was great. I hope that someday I see salpicao (the best description I can offer is a spicy Canadian bacon) at Price Chopper again because that, quickly fried in butter with some apple slices, was heaven.

09/06/2012

Welsh rabbit contains no actual rabbit -- a disappointing revelation when you are a teenager discovering it for the first time on a menu at Colonial Williamsburg -- but is actually cheese sauce poured over toast.

This dish is also cheese sauce poured over toast, so I suppose I could have just called it "Spicy Apple Rabbit," but then some of you would have refused to read this post out of horror at the thought of cooking poor defenseless bunnies while others would have been disappointed to learn the post wasn't about cooking poor defenseless bunnies.

To make this, you will first need to make the dish from yesterday's post. If yesterday's post wasn't enough to convince you, hopefully this will give you that added incentive.

09/05/2012

Yes, I have returned from my hiatus, during which I was totally working on excellent recipes and not just hiding in shame and licking my wounds after losing the final of the Friday Night Food Fight.

Here is a recipe to add to the ones on yesterday's food page. If you make it, hang onto the cooking liquid because tomorrow's post will be something really awesome to do with the leftovers.

Braised Chicken Wings with Spicy Stewed Apples

6 chicken wings (clip off the pointy tips and reserve for making stock.)

4-5 small apples, cored, peeled and cut into eighths

2 small onions, thinly sliced

2 dried chili peppers

1 heaping spoonful of Hungarian hot paprika (I devised this before my discovery of fancy Spanish paprika, which I would most certainly use today)

2-3 cups of chicken stock

2 tablespoons (or more) of smoked maple syrup (I used to get this at the Londonderry farmers market. You can achieve a similar effect with regular maple syrup and liquid smoke.)

A generous splash of apple cider vinegar

olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 375.

Pat the wings dry, season them and brown them in the oil. Remove them from the pot and sweat the onions. Stir in the paprika and cook another minute or so.

Add the apples and mix well. Deglaze with some of the stock, if necessary, and add the vinegar. Return the chicken to the pot with enough stock to come maybe a third of the way up the sides.

Add chili peppers, bring to a boil, transfer to the oven and cook, uncovered, for 75 minutes. Brush the skin with the syrup and cook another 15 minutes. Serve.

Note: It occurs to me that two chicken thighs would cook roughly the same way and be easier to eat and work with, but for some reason I really wanted to braise some wings. Feel free to substitute as you see fit.